Friday, March 26, 2010

On December 6, 2010, Dave Brubeck will celebrate his 90th birthday. The editorial staff wanted to do something special to commemorate it, so we turned to Doug Ramsey, who has graciously consented to have his essay - DAVE BRUBECK: A LIFE IN AMERICAN MUSIC - posted on JazzProfiles.

It doesn’t get any more special than that.

If you are looking for more of Doug’s Jazz writings, his current musings can be found daily on his blog – Riffitides.

“Dave remembers the octet as having played four paying concerts: at Mills College in 1946, in 1947 opening for the great Woody Herman Herd in San Francisco, and in 1948 at Dave's alma mater for the College of the Pacific chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national music frater­nity. Then, in 1949, they gave a concert of their newest compositions at the Marines Memorial Auditorium in San Francisco. That was a turn­ing point.

The Marines Memorial concert was attended by Jimmy Lyons, a young disc jockey with open ears. Lyons' enthusiasm persuaded his bosses at KNBC to launch a weekly program called "Lyons Busy," featuring Bru-beck and a trio drawn from the octet. Ron Crotty was the bassist, Cal Tjader was the drummer, doubling occasionally on vibraharp. In some pieces, Tjader's quick reflexes and athletic ability were needed when he was called on to switch from vibes to drums in the split second between choruses.

In 1950, Down Beat, evidently on the strength of Brubeck's first trio recordings and the attention paid his music by critics like Barry Ulanov and Ralph J. Gleason, published a piece co-authored by Dave and lola. In it, Brubeck recommended that jazzmen explore the possibilities contained in the polytonal examples of Bartok and other classical composers. But he went on to make it clear that in the matter of spontaneous creation, he felt that improvisation was the heart of jazz: "I will not go so far as to say jazz ceases to be jazz once it is written. But I do say that improvisation is the criterion by which all jazz, written or unwritten, is judged. The degree of its 'goodness' is based on its proximity to improvisation."

Although the quartet with Desmond is what most people think of when they hear the name Brubeck, the music in this collection, from the vaults of five companies, includes important recordings made before the quartet was formed in 1951 and after it was disbanded at the end of 1967. "INDIANA" was one of four trio performances the Brubeck Trio recorded in September of 1949 for Coronet, a San Francisco label established by the traditional trombonist Jack Sheedy. The two 78-rpm records were popular enough that when Coronet went out of business not long after, Brubeck (with the backing of Max and Sol Weiss) bought the masters of "INDIANA," "LAURA," "TEA FOR TWO" and "BLUE MOON." He paid $350. In those days, that was real money, especially for a young family man who wasn't working much. It was enough, in any case, to lay a foundation.

The brothers Weiss operated the Circle Record Company, a pressing plant that manufactured the Coronet 78s. On the strength of the Brubeck records they started a company that would originate, not merely press, jazz records. Its first releases were reissues of the Brubeck Trio 78s. With the whimsy and refusal to take itself seriously that overlay everything the company did as long as they ran it, the Weisses named it after a science fiction magazine, Fantasy. Many of their LPs were pressed not on conventional black vinyl but in startling chemical shades of red, green, and purple.

The company was home base for Brubeck in the crucial early years of the trio and quartet, and to Cal Tjader and Vince Guaraldi, both of whom built successful careers on the popularity of their Fantasy recordings. It also helped launch Lenny Bruce, whose irreverence and attacks on con­ventional wisdom and attitudes sounded a lot like many of the conversa­tions that took place on an average afternoon at the headquarters of Fantasy. Years later, Max and Sol sold Fantasy and their other label, Galaxy, to an employee, Saul Zaentz, who went on to acquire Prestige, Milestone, Riverside, Contemporary, and other labels, produce motion pictures, and build an entertainment empire.

Nothing so grand seemed in the offing at the little company tucked away in jumbled rooms below Market Street, at first in an alley called Treat Street and later in another named Natoma. Brubeck and the Weisses recorded more trio sides. Fantasy released recordings made by the Bru­beck Octet, but only after the trio had proved that Brubeck could sell records, which had begun to move well not only in the Bay Area but in Portland and Seattle. From among the first records, "BLUE MOON" was chosen best of the month by Metronome magazine. That started a series of awards to Brubeck that has never ended. Three of the trio's recordings, including "UNDECIDED," were on the best-of-the-year list in Jazz 1951, Metronome's yearbook.

BAY AREA SUCCESS

Now Jimmy Lyons, the enthusiastic disc jockey, had more good news for Brubeck. He had landed the trio a job at the Burma Lounge, a popular club near LakeMerritt, virtually in the center of Oakland. After a month of baking, Dave, lola, and their two sons said goodbye to the corrugated oven at ClearLake. The "Lyons Busy" program, riding on the powerful signal of KNBC, sent the live music of Brubeck, Tjader, and Crotty the length of the West Coast and far out into the Pacific, where sailors picked it up on shipboard radios. When the sailors had liberty in San Francisco, every Navy man's favorite port, they sought out the trio at the Burma Lounge, then later across the bay at the Blackhawk in San Francisco, which became Brubeck's virtual headquarters.

As much as six months out of every year, the trio, and later the quartet, played at the Blackhawk, a monument to dimness, dustiness, and the proposition that in a sympathetic setting the listener can become a part of the creative process. His Blackhawk experience must have had a lot to do with the development of Brubeck's often-quoted observation that the success of the quartet was due in large part to the participation of its fifth member, the audience.

"I've worked and slaved to keep this place a sewer," Guido Caccienti used to say of his long, narrow temple of gloom. Guido, his partner Johnny Noga, and their wives, Elynore and Helen, kept the prices reasonable and kept musicians and audiences relaxed with their good-humored tough­ness. It wasn't unusual for a line of customers to wait more or less patiently to pay their dollar cover charges at the door while Elynore and Helen exchanged gossip or the latest Mort Sahl line.

Musicians loved to play the Blackhawk, which the Dave Brubeck Trio helped establish as a jazz club. Count Basic had to love it, to be willing to squeeze 16 instrumentalists and Joe Williams onto a bandstand roughly twice the size of a cocktail table. It was one of Miles Davis' favorite places to play, and Thelonious Monk's, and Shelly Manne's, and the Modern Jazz Quartet's. And, of course, Cal Tjader's and Vince Guaraldi's. On one occasion in the early '50s, when their quartets were working regularly and gaining in popularity, Brubeck's path crossed Gerry Mulligan's, liter­ally; when his group moved south from the Blackhawk to The Haig in Los Angeles, Mulligan's quartet moved north from The Haig to the Blackhawk.

Dave recalled that "It usually took me half an hour to find a parking place in this part of town. Paul would pull up in his car at the last minute and saunter in. Once at intermission I asked him, 'How do you find a parking space?' He said, 'Come across the street and I'll show you.' He was parked in a yellow no-parking zone. I said, 'See what that says, sfpd? San Francisco Police Department?' 'Yeah,' he said, 'Safe for Paul Desmond.'"

Where the Blackhawk once stood at Turk and Hyde in the Tenderloin, no building now stands. The corner is a parking lot, without so much as a plaque to commemorate one of San Francisco's cultural treasures, one of perhaps a half-dozen jazz clubs across the country that may not have made anyone rich, but, through their owners' love of the art and the artists, made a difference in the development of the music.

DESMOND REDUX

Dave had left standing instructions with lola that if Paul Desmond ever showed up, she should not let him in the house. But one day, the Jack Fina experience behind him, Desmond came to the door. In New York, he had heard a recording of the Dave Brubeck Trio on a jazz radio station. lola let him in. Dave was on the back porch pinning diapers to the clothes line.

lola was susceptible to Paul's charm from the first time she met him. She told Gene Lees 40 years later that Desmond looked so forlorn, she went out back and told her husband, "You just have to see him." Brubeck did and, lola said, "...he was full of promises to Dave. He said, 'If you'll just let me play with you, I'll baby-sit, I'll wash your car.'"

Brubeck was unable to keep up his resistance. The partnership was back on, at least in spirit. But making the trio a quartet was impossible finan­cially because club managers discouraged anything that might jeopardize the growing success of the trio. Desmond sat in, but the businessmen interested in the modest fortunes of the group were not particularly happy when he did.

Nonetheless, when the trio was booked into Los Angeles, Desmond went along to sit in at The Haig and later at Zardi's. Dave's family also went to L.A. The Brubecks had been living in an apartment in San Francisco and now rented a tiny cottage on the beach at Santa Monica. They had put money down on a house near San Francisco. When the work in Los Angeles ended and it came time to close on the house, Dave and lola put Darius and Michael in the car and drove all night to keep the appoint­ment. Brubeck remembers having lola periodically slap him to keep him awake during the 400-mile drive.

They arrived on time, to discover that the deal on the house had fallen apart. Their down payment money was tied up in escrow. Most of their belongings were in storage. They had no place to live. So when a booking materialized at the Zebra Lounge in Honolulu, Brubeck took the trio, the wife, and the kids to Hawaii. Stone broke, living in cramped quarters, eating food from cans that had been dented and sold at reduced prices, the Brubecks' fortunes were at a low ebb.

They got lower.

The beaches of Honolulu provided sunshine, water, free recreation, and distractions from poverty. To Dave, lola and the boys, the Tjaders, bassist Jack Weeks, and Dave Van Kriedt, afternoons on the beach were relief from ungenteel poverty. Weeks had replaced Ron Crotty in the trio and Van Kriedt was in Honolulu playing a separate job. They were all together one afternoon when Dave, diving through waves, hit a sand bar and wrenched his neck with so much force that an ambulance driver, noting the angle of the head, thought the injury was fatal.

"I heard him calling ahead on his two-way radio, telling them that he was bringing in a DOA; dead on arrival. I thought he was right," Brubeck says. "I was going in and out of consciousness."

The first hospital he was taken to rejected the patient for inability to pay. When it was established that he had been in the service, arrangements were made for him to be admitted to Tripler, a Veterans Administration hospital. Late that night, lola, who had seen Dave being taken away, got a call informing her that her husband was probably not going to be paralyzed, as doctors had at first feared, that, in fact, he was showing improvement.

Nonetheless, the damage to vertebrae and nerves required him to be in traction for three weeks, ending the job at the Zebra Lounge and putting the Dave Brubeck Trio out of business. Tjader and Weeks went home and formed a new group. Nearly 40 years later, Brubeck still feels pain in his back, neck, and fingers; the legacy of his accident in the Hawaiian surf and a reminder that the outcome could have been infinitely worse.

In traction, on his back painfully scribbling a note to Desmond, Dave wrote, "Maybe now we can start the quartet." Desmond saved the note all his life.

AT LAST, THE QUARTET

Out of the hospital and back in San Francisco, Dave convalesced, then finally got together with Desmond in early 1951 and formed the first Dave Brubeck Quartet. Desmond had kept eating by taking a job in the reed section of the band led by Alvino Rey, who was several years beyond and several pegs below his success in the 1940s with an admired show band. By now, his leadership attempt happily behind him, Desmond had no desire to be anything but a sideman and leave the worrying to someone else. The inclination was so strong that it extended to his business rela­tionship with Brubeck. Throughout all but the earliest years of their career together, they never had a signed contract.

"Paul and I never had an argument about money," Brubeck told Gene Lees. "He never looked at the books. He never asked the attorney to see anything. He said, 'Whatever you say is right.'"

When Paul died, by terms of his will, his share of royalties was left to the American Red Cross, which still receives proceeds of the group's record­ings, and royalties from Desmond's universally popular composition "TAKE FIVE."

The trio had been a success, but the change to a quartet meant a rebuilding challenge. Fred Dutton and Herb Barman were the initial bassist and drummer, with Wyatt "Bull" Ruther or Norm Bates playing bass and Lloyd Davis or Joe Dodge on drums as the band evolved. After the trio dissolved, Cal Tjader had gone on to work with Alvino Rey, then formed his own band before joining George Shearing in 1953. Ron Crotty was back with Brubeck for much of 1953 and 1954.

The group worked in the Bay Area, mostly at the Blackhawk, with occasional forays into southern California or the Northwest. But before the end of 1951, they began to gain attention. The band found itself in demand in clubs around the country. Performances of the spirit, fresh­ness, and intricacy of "LOOK FOR THE SILVER LINING" (in this collec­tion), struck a chord (altered, augmented, or diminished; rarely orthodox) with listeners.

BRUBECK TIME

The improvement in fortunes extended to domesticity. There was a new real estate transaction, and this time it did not collapse. By the middle of 1954, a house in the Oakland Hills contained six Brubecks, Christopher having made his appearance in 1952 and Catherine in 1953. Dave liked it there. He liked it so much that even though national success was in the air, he was on the verge of ignoring it in favor of spending the rest of his career gigging around the Bay Area. There were trips east, but as late as 1954 Brubeck was reluctant to commit himself to the road life that would be required to achieve and maintain major stardom.

In 1954, Brubeck received a boost so unlikely for a jazz musician that the mere thought of it might send him into gales of cynical laughter. time magazine made him the subject of its main article in the November 8, 1954, issue, with an Artzybasheff cover painting of Dave and a caption paraphrasing his boyhood piano idol, Fats Waller: "The joints are really flipping." In the mid-50s, before the pervasive hype of television diluted the impact of every print medium, a cover story in time was a national event. It brought massive attention to the subject.

By then, he and Fantasy had agreed to an amicable separation and Dave had signed an agreement with Columbia Records. But in the overlapping commitments to the two companies, there were to be three more Brubeck albums for Fantasy: in 1957 one of solo piano, and another reuniting the quartet with tenor saxophonist and composer Dave Van Kriedt, Brubeck's boon companion from the MillsCollege and octet days. In 1961, long after Brubeck had become, with Miles Davis, one of Columbia's two major jazz artists, he recorded a quartet album for Fantasy with clarinetist Bill Smith, another octet alumnus, replacing Desmond.

THAT'S HOW IT WAS, MOVING EAST

In 1959, while Brubeck vacillated over whether to aim for a big career, his attorney, James R. Bancroft, asked him, in effect, whether he was inter­ested in getting out of debt and being able to put his children through college. The family was more than broke; Dave recently had paid off a loan to cover back taxes. Bancroft persuaded Brubeck to rent the Oak­land house, go on the road for a year and move his family to the East Coast, near the sources of most of the potential work in clubs and at the colleges where the band had become increasingly popular. In compari­son with the East, there wasn't nearly as much work for jazz musicians out West in those days. He could always move back to the house in the hills above the bay.

A Columbia Records executive, Irving Townsend, was about to take over the label's jazz operations on the West Coast and offered to let Brubeck rent his house in Wilton, Connecticut. Dave and lola took a deep breath and made the move.

The house, one of a dozen in a colony owned by a woman who liked to rent to artists and writers, was in the woods. It had openness, light, and lots of room. The Brubecks liked living there, and Dave enjoyed being able to spend time with his family rather than chewing it up traveling back and forth from coast to coast. Eventually, they decided to sell the house in the Oakland Hills and build their own place in Wilton, an establishment immediately christened by Desmond "The Wilton Hilton." Visitors re­member a piano in every room, including the kitchen. In 1992, they still live there. From its hill, the house looks down and across a sweep of the property's 20 acres of meadow, streams, and woodland.

Brubeck's career had begun to show that it had the potential for steady, respectable growth. Now it took off. His record sales leaped, not only the Columbia recordings with Desmond, Bob Bates, and Joe Dodge, but the ones on Fantasy as well.

Paul gave up his flat in San Francisco and took a spacious top-floor apartment in a building at 55th Street and 6th Avenue in New York; "right at ground zero," he said. He lived there the rest of his life, ten stories up from his favorite restaurant, the French Shack, and within easy striking distance of clubs, concert halls, book stores, record shops, and Fruits of the Aegean, a Greek seafood place that was another of his preferred dining spots. The apartment was just around the corner from the Half Note after it moved to midtown, making it easy for Desmond when he worked there in the 1970s to "fall out of bed and into the club."

Desmond's importance to the success of the quartet is unquestioned, especially by Brubeck. Both of them told me on several occasions that even the stunning moments of contrapuntal improvisation in the best of their Fantasy and Columbia recordings did not approach the peak of what Desmond called their "inspired madness" at the Band Box and later when he sat in with the trio. There's a hint of it in the 1952 Storyville album that for the next 25 years remained Paul's favorite, more than a hint in the 32 bars of counterpoint in the live broadcast of "LOOK FOR THE SILVER LINING" from 1951, and an intense dose of it as Dave supplies his partner harmonic direction and rhythmic accents in "LE SOUK," 1954, one of Desmond's greatest flights of invention.

That accompaniment is the work of a man in profound concentration and support, deep in the interaction of emotions and intellects that constitutes jazz improvisation. It epitomizes and symbolizes the selflessness and interdependence that in its finest moments make jazz an act of coopera­tive creation without parallel in the performing arts. The frequency of those moments in the Brubeck group is what led bassist Eugene Wright to tell a fellow musician who came backstage one night to question Wright's presence in an otherwise white band, "Look, man, there's a lot of love in this group."

The power and weight of many of Brubeck's solos have led his critics to charge him with the sin of heavy-handedness, excessive romanticism, bombast. Once in the 1960s when we were discussing jazz criticism, an activity he regards with alternate amusement and frustration, he said, "The word bombast keeps coming up, as if it were some trap I keep falling into. Damn it, when I'm bombastic I have my reasons; I want to be bombastic. Take it or leave it."

THE ACCOMPANIST

Many critics, full of admiration for Desmond, wondered how he could put up with what they considered the insensitivity of Brubeck's piano play­ing. They did not hear or could not hear what led Desmond, in his most serious moments of discussing his friend, into effusions of praise for the attentiveness, delicacy, and suggestiveness of Brubeck's accompaniments.

Ignoring the success of the early trio, it was often alleged that without Desmond, Brubeck would never have made it. In that invaluable interview with Marian McPartland, Paul responded, plainly:

"I never would have made it without Dave. He's amazing harmonically, and he can be a fantastic accompanist. You can play the wrongest note possible in any chord, and he can make it sound like the only right one.

"I still feel more kinship musically with Dave than with anyone else, although it may not always be evident. But when he's at his best, it's really something to hear. A lot of people don't know this, because in addition to the kind of fluctuating level of performance that most jazz musicians give, Dave has a real aversion to working things out, and a tendency to take the things he can do for granted and most of his time trying to do other things. This is okay for people who have heard him play at his best, but sometimes mystifying to those who haven't.

"However, once in a while somebody who had no use for Dave previously comes in and catches a really good set and leaves looking kind of dazed."

In the quartet, Brubeck's taste for a little bombast extended to the exuber­ances of drummers. In a few places on the celebrated Jazz Goes To College album he can be heard encouraging the bass drum detonations inserted into his solos by Joe Dodge. "Yeah, Joe," he exclaims, whereupon Dodge launches another little mortar attack.

Desmond's idea of appropriate drumming was more in line with that of one of his heroes, Lester Young. Young had been conditioned in his Count Basic days to the impeccable ball-bearing smoothness of Jo Jones and he spent much of the rest of his career discouraging the enthusiasms and paradiddle fills of those he sometimes called "the bebop kiddies."

"Just a little tinky-boom," Pres used to instruct his percussionists. "Don't drop those bombs back there." It's no wonder that Desmond loved to play with Connie Kay, the former Lester Young drummer who took his sub­tlety and mastery of time to new levels with the Modern Jazz Quartet.

On the other hand, and both feet, there was Joe Dodge, succeeded by Joe Morello. Dodge, an old San Francisco hand, was a bear of a man, a swinger capable of using wire brushes to drive the time unobtrusively but whose temperament had something in common with that of a bombar­dier. Desmond was fond of Dodge's playing and arranged a truce under which Dodge would keep things down to, at maximum, a medium roar when Paul was soloing.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

No one writes about Jazz in general and about Dave Brubeck in particular like Doug Ramsey, unless, of course, Doug is writing about Dave’s long-time musical associate and their mutual friend, the late alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond.

“Some time ago, a woman in Connecticut, where Dave Brubeck lives, was looking for a pianist to play a wedding. Having got hold of a musicians union directory, she called a number she found under the "Piano" heading. Brubeck was considering taking the job, for scale, the minimum amount of pay the union allows a player to accept. But finally the name attached to the phone number registered with the woman. She shrieked in embarrassment, apologized profusely for what she believed had been an insult, and hung up.

"Usually, I play at weddings only for close friends," Brubeck joked later. "But I was thinking it over."

He may also have been thinking about the years following World War II, when his dream was to make scale. The earliest recording in this collec­tion is from 1946, when that dream seemed closer and there was hope of getting out of the poverty of a struggling musician fresh out of the Army. The most recent recording is from 1991. Brubeck, now famous around the world, still carries the memory of living with his wife and babies in a corrugated tin room without windows.

The music here includes recordings from a period during which Brubeck and his quartet galvanized an entire college generation's interest in jazz, made the cover of Time magazine, became the first instrumental group to sell a million records (Time Out], opened the jazz community to the possibilities of improvisation in time signatures such as 5/4,7/4,9/8,11/4, and 13/4, and was on the road more or less continuously, playing for audiences at home and in India, Poland, Japan, Mexico, Germany, Holland, Argentina, the Soviet Union, and most of the rest of the United Nations.

Brubeck's importance to and influence on jazz are undeniable, except by some of the jazz "elite" and the constituency it has educated to believe that the enormous popularity of the quartet was proof that wide commer­cial acceptance is tantamount to artistic sellout. The same charge has been made against Louis Armstrong, Cannonball Adderley, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and just about any solvent jazz musician.

FAME AND THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

In 1953, before it was considered commercially successful, the Dave Brubeck Quartet won first place in both the Critic's Poll and the Reader's Poll in Down Beat Magazine. With recognition came detraction. Some of the reasons are rooted in the complexities of ethnocentrism, clannishness, commercialism, and transitory values in our society. Others are as ancient as the jealous ego. But time, not the jazz establishment of the moment, will evaluate the permanence of Brubeck's contributions. It will take into account his work as a pianist whose individualism does not always match the conventional view of what is proper in jazz piano, as a song writer of power and lyricism, as a long-form composer of secular and religious music, and as a leader who harnessed and melded the talents of men with personalities that, like his own, grew out of strength, even obstinacy.

Brubeck needed strength when he emerged from the Army at the end of the war, burning to develop ideas that had germinated through an active musical childhood and his years of studying music at College of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Dave had been playing the piano since he was four years old in Concord, California, where he was born on December 6, 1920. Music was an important part of his life even when, from the age of 13, he started working as a cowboy on the 45,000 acre cattle ranch managed by his father.

RHYTHMS OF THE RANGE

The ranch, still owned by the Moffat family, spreads across the parched fastness of San Joaquin, Sacramento, and Amador counties. Its original boundaries were the MokelumneRiver north to the Cosumnes, and from the Sacramento River east to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Brubeck says that as he tended cattle, the rhythms of the ranch fired a fascination with divisions of musical time.

"The first polyrhythms I thought about were when I was riding horseback. The gait was usually a fast walk, maybe a trot," he says, "and I would sing against that constant gait of the horse. Moving the cattle, we might drive them from Oakdale to lone, 40 miles or so. In a round-up, my dad always told me to keep in sight of the cowhands to my left and right, but they could be a mile or so away. The cattle, the horses, everything, got into a rhythm on those hot summer days, except when one of the cattle would turn back and I'd have to get it back with the herd. There was nothing to do but think, and I'd improvise melodies and rhythms."

His imagination was sparked by the sound permutations of anvils in the blacksmith shop, machinery in the hay fields and the one-lung gasoline engine that drove the pump forcing water into the stock tanks.

"That little engine was an incredible generator of rhythms. It would take a couple of hours for one of those water tanks to fill. I'd sit there in the shade of the tank listening to the engine and putting other rhythms against it."

H.P. (Pete) Brubeck, Dave's father, was a lifelong cattleman and a champi­onship rodeo roper. I recognized someone familiar when I saw a photo­graph of Mr. Brubeck on the ranch in his working outfit — Levis, shirt buttoned closely around the wrists to protect against scrapes and insect bites, five-gallon hat cocked over the right eye, the horn of a prize bull in one hand and a halter rope in the other. I was looking at my grandfather and uncles on the family ranch in Montana where I did part of my growing up; the same easy confidence in the stance, the same gaze signal­ing defiance at the ready. The face might have been painted by Charles Russell. And it has a quality that brings to mind Paul Desmond's cele­brated account of meeting and playing with Dave Brubeck for the first time and being struck by this daring pianist "with the expression of a surly Sioux."

THE QUESTION OF INDIAN BLOOD

Paul's poetic image may have reflected reality. Pete Brubeck's heritage had a lot of Germany in it, but Dave told Gene Lees in 1991 that his father, born in 1884 near the Pyramid Lake Indian reservation in Nevada not far from the California border, could be part Modoc, maybe as much as a fourth or more.

"Once in a while, my dad would make a remark that hinted at this heritage, and when I was young he took a picture of me with an Indian boy who was my age. He wrote on it, 'Which is the Indian boy?' Any time he'd mention it, my mother would deny it. And to this day, my dad's younger brother, who's over 90, says it's impossible. But another branch of the family says my grandfather was married three times, once perhaps to an Indian woman."

Dave was Pete's last hope that a son would follow him in the cattle trade. It was too late for the older brothers. They were committed to music. Howard was headed toward a career as a composer and college professor. Henry was already in Stockton playing drums with a band led by Gil Evans, who more than two decades later would become the arranging eminence of the post-war modern jazz movement. Henry later became head of music for Santa Barbara public schools. Dave was born in 1920, Howard in 1916, Henry in 1910.

Dave spent hours on horseback in the isolation of the ranch, riding fence, filling water tanks, and rounding up strays. As a teenager, playing with local bands in places like Angels Camp and Sutter Creek, his intention was always to work on the ranch, even when his mother insisted that he follow in his brothers' footsteps and go to college.

Dave's mother, Elizabeth Ivey (Bessie) Brubeck was the daughter of the man who operated the livery stable in Concord. Henry Ivey spotted Pete Brubeck around the turn of the century when the 16-year-old cowboy delivered a train carload of wild horses and a carload of cattle he had helped round up at his father's ranch near PyramidLake.

"The livery stable was sort of the rent-a-car of those days," Dave says, "so my Dad went to rent a saddle horse and hire some hands to help him move the stock to the new family ranch near Concord. My mother was in her early teens. Her father went home that night and told her, 'I met a real young man at the corral today.' My dad soon ran off the other suitors. When my dad finally proposed, my mom's father told her, 'Bessie, if you marry him, you'll never want for a sack of flour.'

THE READING CONUNDRUM

Bessie Brubeck was a classical pianist and a prominent piano teacher. She studied in Great Britain with the influential teacher Tobias Matthay and later with Dame Myra Hess, the legendary pianist known as the Great Lady of Music and the First Lady of the Piano. But Mrs. Brubeck's studies abroad began after she had three sons. The eldest, Henry, went to Europe with her. She came to miss terribly the two sons she had left at home. Deciding against a career as a concert pianist, she returned from London to raise her children and teach piano.

One of her students fooled her. Her youngest son's ear was so adept that he learned to play by listening. She discovered when it was too late, when he was playing well, that David could not read music, that when he stared so intently at the manuscript pages on the piano, he was faking. But it was not just his exceptional ear that led to his cover-up.

"I was born cross-eyed. I had to wear glasses before I got out of the crib. I was very cross-eyed," Brubeck told me. "You see things differently, and I think at first it wasn't clear to me how the music lined up, and I learned I could get by faking it. My mother taught all day long and I could hear the things she was teaching and could pretend that I was reading. I tried to correct it myself, but by then I was 12 or so and it was very difficult to change my habits."

Through weekly visits to the eye doctor from an early age, and through the use of corrective lenses, young Dave's eyes eventually uncrossed. As he got older, his vision improved and his trademark tortoise shell "bebop" glasses were no longer a necessity.

By the time the Brubecks moved to lone, southeast of Sacramento in the foothills of the Sierra NevadaMountains, Dave's mother was convinced that he was going to be a cowboy, and she never gave him another lesson. Nor did the question of reading music ever come up between them.

"We never discussed it," he said. "It must have been an embarrassment to her."

Literacy in the language of music, as in the language of words, comes easiest and most naturally when the brain is young and growing and at its peak of receptiveness. Later in life, as Dave was to discover, it comes with great effort. During his teenage years on the ranch he continued to explore the harmonic and rhythmic possibilities of the popular songs of the day. By the time he was in his early teens, he was making money playing the piano, his remarkable ear carrying him through.

The little gasoline engine and the hooves of horses inspired polyrhythms. As often as he could, he rode with Pete Brubeck's top cowhand, Al Walloupe from the Miwok tribe, who sang with young Dave and, through his knowledge of Indian songs, became a lifelong friend and musical influence. But the jazz that first moved Brubeck was by pianists Fats Waller and Billy Kyle.

"The first record I ever bought was by Fats Waller, when I was 14. But I had heard the Billy Kyle trio on the radio, even before I heard Fats. The Waller record had "LET’S BE FAIR AND SQUARE IN LOVE" on one side and "THERE’S HONEY ON THE MOON TONIGHT" on the other. When you're working for a dollar a day and the record costs 50 cents, it's a big decision."

More than two decades later, Dave and his hero, Kyle, collaborated at the piano behind Louis Armstrong's vocal on Brubeck's "summer song," heard in this collection. In the mid-1930s, his playing was influenced by Kyle and Waller, but his older dance band colleagues noticed the streak of unorthodoxy that was to baffle or frustrate other musicians for a long time to come.

SCREWING UP THE SHUFFLE RHYTHM

"The band used shuffle rhythms in practically everything, just that steady shuffle rhythm that Jonah Jones had all those hits with later. The leader was a trumpet player and he loved Clyde McCoy. I'd get bored and screw that rhythm up on purpose, break it up, and get dirty looks. And har­mony; by the time I got to college at 17, I was really messing with harmony, but I didn't know how to explain it to anybody else."

He had no idea of music as a profession. He was committed to the career his father had in mind for him.

"I would never have left the ranch if my mother hadn't insisted that I go to college like my two brothers did. I didn't want to go. No way. The compro­mise was that I would be a veterinarian and come back to the ranch."

Brubeck enrolled at College of the Pacific in Stockton as a pre-medical veterinary student. He lived in a boarding house with several music students. During the progress of his education, which was saturated with science studies, he related his academic situation to theirs.

"I knew, innately, what they were struggling over musically. What I was struggling over was zoology and chemistry, which, innately, I did not know. What my brilliant mind put together was, 'as bad as this is, it would be easier in music.' So I switched over, with no intention of becoming a so-called trained musician. It was just a way of staying in school more easily, because I was a very uneven student. I was likely to get an A in one subject and an F in another."

Now he was a music major and his inability to read began to haunt him. Faking it wasn't quite so easy here, where a professor was likely to insist that he be able to describe a progression or the makeup of a chord. The legend at C.O.P. is that Brubeck and three other musicians lived in an enormous basement they called "The Bomb Shelter." The amenities were a cold water faucet, a stove for cooking, and an old upright Starr piano. In the September, 1991, Jazzletter, Dave told Gene Lees about those days.

"WAKE UP BRUBECK"

"....Like, in ear training, I'd usually be asleep, 'cause I'd been working in some joint the night before until two in the morning. There are stories about the teacher saying, 'Well, can anybody play this progression and tell me what I've just played?' Then he'd say, 'Well, if nobody can, then wake up Brubeck.'

"In my own way, I could do it. He'd say, 'What chord is this?' and I'd say, That's the first chord in "don't worry 'bout me.'" Then he'd say, 'Well, explain that, Mr. Brubeck.' I'd go play that chord. He'd say, 'Well can't you say that's a flat ninth?' I didn't know it was a flat ninth. But that's the way I got through."

Sometimes he wasn't allowed to explain simply by playing an answer to a musical question. Finally, forced to take a keyboard class, the deceiver was exposed. The professor reported to the dean the inescapable and astounding fact that Dave Brubeck, a senior in a music conservatory, the brother of two distinguished conservatory graduates, the son of a re­spected music teacher, could not read music.

"In my final for harmony class, I got an A for ideas and an F for writing the notation down, so he gave me a C. I remember my teacher, Dr. J. Russell Bodley, telling me, 'I couldn't wait to get to your paper because I knew it was going to be the most exciting. Dave, you misspelled most of the chords, but you had the right notes down.' That was typical."

The dean informed Brubeck that he would not be allowed to graduate. But Brubeck had proved to some of the faculty that he had a brilliant aptitude for harmony and counterpoint. He had, in fact, enchanted the counterpoint teacher, who explained to the dean that Brubeck had "writ­ten" the best counterpoint of any student he'd ever had. Dr. Bodley, the ear-training and composition professor offered similar praise, and the two of them convinced the dean to let Brubeck graduate. There was, however, a condition; that Brubeck promise "never to teach and embarrass the conservatory."

He promised. He was graduated. His teaching has been by example.

Brubeck's father, who had hoped for a son to join him in cattle ranching, was disappointed when Dave turned from veterinary medicine to music. But he offered support and a fallback position.

"He understood, and he said, 'You know we started a herd of cattle that's yours.' He gave me four cows when I graduated from grammar school. He kept books on how they multiplied, kept 'em separate and said, These are Dave's,' and he told me, 'You know, if it ever gets too tough on you, you can always come home and you'll have a start in the cattle business.' That was important to me, too, because there were times when I was ready to give up; driving across the country in my Kaiser automobile, trying to keep the family together, without money to stay in a hotel, living in the worst kind of conditions. When it was impossible to keep groups on the road and I wouldn't know how we were going to get to the next town, defeat after defeat after defeat, I'd start thinking about the ranch again."

Dave's herd was maintained until Pete Brubeck's death in 1954. By then, Brubeck's musical fortunes had improved.

IOLA

Not long after his graduation from C.O.P., Brubeck went into the Army. In 1942, when he was on a three-day pass, he married lola Whitlock, a student he fell in love with at C.O.P.; "the incomparable, regal lola," Paul Desmond called her. Dave had met her after his mother insisted that at least once before he graduated he do a conventional college thing, go to a fraternity dance. Three hours after they arrived at the dance, Dave and lola decided to get married. Six children and fifty years later, lola still wears her long brown hair in braids, and she and her husband are under the same spell they cast on each other that night in Stockton.

Brubeck was in an Army band at CampHahn, near Riverside, California. He got into Los Angeles occasionally, thinking of himself as a potential composer and arranger who happened to play piano, and eager to make an impression. Once when he was on a pass, he visited the rising young bandleader Stan Kenton at Kenton's house in the Hollywood Hills. He had written a piece called "PRAYER OF THE CONQUERED" with Kenton's band in mind. He played it on Kenton's piano.

"He asked me, 'Where did you ever hear voicings like this?' and had me take the music to the NBC radio studio where he was the bandleader for the "Bob Hope Show." The Kenton band played the chart down, but Stan found it too far out. He said, 'Bring it back in ten years. I'd like to talk to you about arranging for the band.'"

The year was 1942, and Kenton was consolidating a reputation as a forward-looking bandleader. But the 22-year-old Brubeck was apparently looking a considerable distance beyond Kenton's vision.

"I was always getting put down for what I was writing. Trumpets a half-step apart, that sort of thing. It's common now. It wasn't then. But there were always some people who liked it, always someone who would say, 'Oh, boy, I never heard chords like that.'"

THE SCHOENBERG ENCOUNTER

In another Los Angeles encounter, Brubeck, with high hopes, approached the formidable composer Arnold Schoenberg, a member of the music faculty at UCLA. Brubeck wanted to study with this pioneer of modern music who early in his career moved beyond the norms of tonality and form.

"I had one interview and one lesson," Brubeck recalls. "After I had played him something, he said, 'Why did you write this?' I told him, 'It's what I wanted to show you.' He asked me, 'But do you have a reason for every note? There has to be a reason for every note.' I told him, 'I write it because it sounds good.' He said, 'That's not reason enough; there has to be a reason.' I didn't like his approach and he didn't like mine and that was the end of it. I like much of his music, but I knew we couldn't get along."

After D-Day in 1944, the American military machine in Europe de­manded a massive injection of combat troops. Brubeck and many of the other musicians from CampHahn were shipped to Europe as riflemen. On his way through San Francisco, he sat in with members of the 253rd American Ground Forces Band stationed at the Presidio. One of those in the jam session was a clarinetist who had taken up alto saxophone the year before. Years later, the alto player, whose name was Paul Desmond, said he had been dazzled by Brubeck's harmonic approach. In an inter­view for a Down Beat article in September, 1960, Desmond alleged to pianist Marian McPartland doubling as journalist, that he complemented Brubeck as follows:

"Man, like Wigsville! You really grooved me with those nutty changes." He said Brubeck replied, "White man speak with forked tongue," a line that was occasionally exchanged between the two over the next three decades to the glee of Brubeck and Desmond and the mystification of nearly everyone who overheard it.

A replacement in Patton's Third Army, 140th Infantry Regiment, A Com­pany, Dave was near the front in the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 and early 1945. Twice, he found himself behind the German lines when the front moved. He was always near the action, on the verge of being sent into combat. Music saved him.

Waiting for an order to move with his outfit closer to the battle, Brubeck heard a Red Cross girl ask if anyone could play the piano for a show. He volunteered. A colonel who heard him pulled the form required to send an enlisted man into combat, and ordered Brubeck and two other musicians to put together a band to entertain the men who had returned from the front to recover from battle fatigue. The band was made up for the most part of soldiers who had been wounded, and it was, to Brubeck's knowl­edge, the first integrated military unit in World War II.

PFC-IN-CHARGE

For reasons Brubeck can't remember and says he may never have known, the group was called The Wolf Pack Band. A private first class, he had the lowest rank in the band but was ultimately assigned an 020 specialty number, bandleader, and put in charge of an outfit in which he was out­ranked by all of the members.

"Eventually they wanted to make me a warrant officer," Brubeck says, "but I would have had to live with the officers, and I didn't want to leave the band, so I kept the PFC rating and stayed where I was."

Where he was, frequently, was in trouble. The colonel, concerned that everyone qualified to fight was about to be sent to the front lines, ordered Brubeck to load the band on a couple of trucks and "take a Cook's Tour." In other words, he and the band were to get lost until the crisis passed.

"Unfortunately, we drove right into the Bulge, which wasn't the Bulge yet. We saw some guys in a clearing, eating, so we thought we'd play for them. As we were playing, a plane flew over. Since no one had seen an enemy plane for a month, no one thought anything of it. Then it came back, and we saw that it was a German plane. I said, 'Let's get the hell out of here.'

"The driver took a wrong turn, and we were going away from protection, through the enemy lines. It was dark by now, no headlights allowed, and a sentry with a camouflage flashlight waved us through a checkpoint. As we drove through, I realized it was a German soldier and a German check­point. We went up the road a way, turned around, gunned the engine, and drove by him as he waved us through again. I thought for sure there would be a tank there ready to blow us to hell.

"When we got back to a sentry point on the American lines, a soldier walked up to us carrying two hand grenades with the pins pulled, ready to use them. One of the guys in the back of the truck was yelling, 'Don't forget the password.' But even after I gave it, this guy was suspicious. I still thought he might drop the grenades into the truck. After a few tense moments, he finally believed who we were. He then explained that earlier the same night Germans wearing American uniforms and driving Ameri­can trucks had killed all of his buddies at that same sentry point."

Among The Wolf Pack's assignments was the accompaniment of a tour­ing unit of the RadioCityMusic Hall show which included the Rockettes. This allowed the musicians the luxury of sleeping in hotels rather than haystacks and boxcars or on the ground. But luxury seldom came. As members of an unauthorized band, they had no access to Army instru­ments. They traded cigarettes for instruments in captured German terri­tory and later in a village in Czechoslovakia known for its instrument making.

None of the Wolf Pack musicians reached anything like Brubeck's promi­nence. But Johnny Stanley, the master of ceremonies, had a postwar comedy hit record called, "IT’S IN THE BOOK." Another member, Leon Pober, was the composer of the song "PEARLY SHELLS" and many other commercial successes and gets credit for "ZEN IS WHEN," in Brubeck's 1964 album, Jazz Impressions Of Japan. (CS 9012) Dave remained with the band until he was discharged in 1946 and has stayed in touch with many of its members to this day.

At College of the Pacific, Brubeck had faced discouragement more daunt­ing than sleeplessness and the academic obstacles erected by his inability to read music; he was a jazz musician. As much as individual members of the faculty may have liked Brubeck and admired his gifts, the jazz musi­cian was a species beneath their consideration as a serious artist and Dave's unorthodox ideas about music were resisted and discouraged by some of the faculty and many of the students. Given his single-minded-ness and cowboy stubbornness, the opposition may have spurred Brubeck in his determination. Ironically, in developing his jazz, Brubeck was dedi­cated to experimentation with tonality, harmony, and polyrhythms not unlike qualities in the music of Bartok, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Milhaud, and other pioneers of contemporary "classical" music.

WITH MILHAUD AT MILLS

That made the next stop in his career a considerably more congenial affair. Discharged by the Army in 1946, Brubeck rejoined the wife he had not seen in two years. Under the GI Bill that made higher education possible for millions of veterans, he entered MillsCollege in Oakland to study under Darius Milhaud. Pete Rugolo and Dave's brother, Howard, were Milhaud's first male graduate students at this women's college. Howard served for many years as Milhaud's assistant at Mills. The composer of "ALLEGRO BLUES," Howard Brubeck is retired as chairman of the music department at PalomarCollege in southern California. Rugolo went on to become one of Hollywood's busiest composers, contributing heavily to Stan Kenton's book during the band's peak of success.

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) was a French composer of staggering crea­tivity and output. He wrote at least 450 works with opus numbers. Among them were full-scale operas, choral works, orchestral composi­tions, 18 string quartets, chamber music of every description, and piano pieces. A member of the celebrated group of composers known as The Six that included Francis Poulenc and Arthur Honneger, he was very aware of Igor Stravinsky and Charles Koechlin and jazz.

The result was a style incorporating diatonicism, metric complexity, synco­pation, and daring uses of bitonality. Listeners interested in finding com­mon ground between Milhaud and Brubeck may hear it most clearly in Milhaud piano pieces. Those interested in how Brubeck wrote the lessons of the modern masters into his own compositions may refer to his octet pieces "PLAYLAND-AT-THE-BEACH" and "RONDO" (Fantasy OJCCD 101) also under the spell of the Stravinsky of the "EBONY CONCERTO" period.

SOMEPLACE TO GO

"At my lessons with Milhaud," Brubeck says, "he would play through my compositions and make suggestions. One piece was a sonata. I thought the second theme was fine. But he said, Put a flat in front of every note in that theme.' I did, and it was transformed, so that when the piece returned to the first theme there was a modulation.

"He always said that modulation was the greatest thing in music, that it could lift your spirit... or bring it down. Then he said something I've never forgotten: The reason I don't like 12-tone music is that you're never someplace. Therefore, you can never go someplace.'

"Beethoven loved modulation. So did Brahms. They're always taking us to a new place."

When he arrived at Mills, Dave thought of himself as more a composer than a pianist. He still couldn't read well, but Milhaud immediately saw Brubeck's potential and guided the 26-year-old's studies in counterpoint, theory, polyrhythms, and polytonality. He insisted that Dave learn com­positional theory and, once satisfied that he had, urged Brubeck to put it into practice. That didn't take much urging. At Milhaud's suggestion he and some of the other Milhaud students put together a band so they could hear what they were writing.

THE BIRTH OF THE OCTET

The band born in Milhaud's classroom was initially called "The 8." It became the Dave Brubeck Octet, a group that worked on some of the same problems confronted later in the decade in some of the same ways by nine New York musicians whose creative leader was Gil Evans, the former Stockton bandleader of Brubeck's brother Henry. Under Miles Davis' name, the New Yorkers recorded what came to be known as The Birth Of The Cool. "CURTAIN THEME," sometimes called "OPENING THEME, " was written for the octet by Brubeck in 1946 (three years before The Birth Of The Cool sessions).

"Milhaud liked our music," Brubeck says. "He loved Dave Van Kriedt's "FUGUE ON BOP THEMES." He said it was a wonderful example of a real fugue, written in a jazz style. He was as strict as could be about counterpoint. You had to follow his rules, which were Bach's rules. Kriedt just had a natural gift for writing fugues. How else could this young jazz player absorb that so fast and translate it into the jazz idiom? It's a classic piece."

Asked in 1992 about when he had finally learned to read, Brubeck said, "next year." Asked what it was like to write music when he was not a proficient reader, he said, "like sweating blood, but I'm getting better."

Maybe because of the eye problem, I was a hard person to train, whether it was shooting a rifle, playing sports, or playing the piano. I always had to do everything my own way. The way I learned to read music was by writing music. I struggled with that for years. Milhaud told me, 'You're never going to have conventional classical training, but you will do it on your own. I know you're going to be a composer.' So I got to where I could put it down and read my own stuff. By now I'm to the point where I can write music on airplanes."

Most of the members of the octet were studying with Milhaud: Brubeck, Bill Smith, Dave Van Kriedt, Jack Weeks, and Dick Collins. Collins, a superb trumpet soloist, along with Van Kriedt and Weeks, had also stud­ied with Milhaud in Paris. Weeks, a pianist and arranger, who was the son of the popular San Francisco bandleader Anson Weeks, plays bass and trombone on some of the octet recordings and contributed to the octet's repertoire, among other pieces, a demonic short arrangement of "THE PRISONER’S SONG." From the Bay Area jazz community came Cal Tjader, Bob Collins, Ron Crotty, Paul Desmond and Bob Cummings, the latter two sharing alto saxophone duties. Desmond and Tjader were students at San Francisco State College, where Desmond was majoring in creative writing and Tjader in music education.

There are interesting parallels between the Brubeck and Davis bands. Both were experimental, although in pieces such as "CURTAIN MUSIC" and "THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT," the Brubeck Octet demonstrated more audacity with its polytonality and polyrhythms. Both bands were ahead of their time. Both had few paying jobs. On records released in the same year, both sound fresh and undated more than 40 years later, still models for inventive uses of textures, counterpoint, moving harmonies and time signa­tures. The time signature for "CURTAIN MUSIC" is in 6. Bill Smith used 7/4 in "schizophrenic scherzo" and experimented with overlapping rhythms (5 against 4, etc) throughout "WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE." Brubeck's adventures in time began long before "BLUE RONDO A LA TURK" and "TAKE FIVE."

There are similarities in phrasings of melody lines and in voicings, right down to the ways in which the alto leads of Paul Desmond and Lee Konitz were employed in the two bands. Classical influences and currents of musical thought in post-war jazz were informing composers and ar­rangers working 3,000 miles apart. Gerry Mulligan, along with Evans and John Lewis, a key arranger for the Davis band, went on to form his own quartet, which became, like Brubeck's, one of the most successful of the 1950s. More than 20 years later, Brubeck and Mulligan became collaborators.

THE THREE Ds

In 1947, the year lola gave birth to their first son, Darius, Brubeck had managed to find work as a pianist while he was studying at Mills with Milhaud. He had a gig at the Geary Cellar in San Francisco in a group called The Three Ds, led by tenor saxophonist Daryl Cutler and including a bassist named Don Ratto who was later replaced by Norman Bates. "We used to call him Dorman Bates," Brubeck says. The singer was Frances Lynn. Paul Desmond frequently sat in. Desmond told me years later that the first time he and Brubeck played together at the Geary Cellar, the empathy was total and the counterpoint that became the centerpiece of their collaborations happened that night without planning or discussion.

In 1960, Desmond told Marian McPartland, "If you think Dave plays far out now, you should have heard him then. He made Cecil Taylor sound like Lester Lanin." Unless you want to include their brief encounter during the war, it was the beginning of one of the tightest, and longest, musical partnerships between any two jazz musicians. Nonetheless, the relationship nearly ended before it had a chance to get off the ground.

Having been offered a job as leader, Desmond in 1949 hired Cutler's band out from under him for an engagement in Palo Alto at the Band Box, a club Brubeck described to Gene Lees as "a Quonset Hut kind of place." Brubeck enjoyed playing with Desmond and felt he had no choice but to join Paul's band, even though Cutler had been paying him $100 a week and Desmond was paying $42. The challenges of working with Desmond at the Band Box came in several forms other than financial. One of them was getting to the job, 30 miles away.

"Paul considered himself a terrific driver," Brubeck once told me. "He had calculated that the traffic lights on a stretch of road down the peninsula to Palo Alto were timed for 45 miles an hour. Using perfect logic, he figured out that if you could make all the lights at 45, you could make them at 90 and leave later for the gig. Every time we drove down there, I thought there was a good chance I was going to die."

AT THE BAND BOX

Having arrived alive, however, the two further developed the symbiosis that had sprung up at the Geary Cellar through ESP, fate or good luck. Brubeck remembers the music during the three weeks of the Band Box engagement with the same expressions of awe and amazement that Des­mond related in the Down Beat interview.

"I have a memory of several nights that seemed fantastic, and I don't feel that way too often," Desmond told Marian. "I'd give anything for a tape of one of those nights now, just to see what was really going on.

"I know we were playing a lot of counterpoint on almost every tune, and the general level was a lot more loud, emotional, and unsubtle then. I was always screaming away at the top of the horn, and Dave would be constructing something behind me in three keys. Sometimes I had to plead with him to play something more simple behind me.

"It seemed pretty wild at the time; it was one of those few jobs where you really hated to stop — we'd keep playing on the theme until they practi­cally threw us off the stand.

"Anyway, that's where the empathy between Dave and me began, and it's survived a remarkable amount of pulling and pushing in the 11 years or so since."

But it nearly failed to survive the Band Box episode and its aftermath. For Brubeck, one of the perils of Paul was Desmond's youthful self-absorp­tion, which matched and sometimes overrode his charm. While Dave was scuffling on the Band Box pay under Desmond's leadership, Paul got a job at the Feather River Inn, northeast of San Francisco in the peaceful countryside above Sacramento, and stole the band. He took Bates and Frances Lynn with him, hired another pianist and refused to let Brubeck take over the job at the Band Box, insisting that he would come back to it at the end of the three-months' run at Feather River. He didn't. In early 1950, he took a chair in the saxophone section of Jack Fina's band and eventually one in Alvino Rey's.

With Desmond on the road playing "SPAGHETTI RAG" with Fina, Bru­beck was faced with finding a way to support his family. Unable to get the Band Box job, he finally landed a gig at a resort club called the Silver Log Tavern at ClearLake, north of Santa Rosa. The quartet was led by the Oakland trumpet player Rudy Salvini. The deal was scale plus a place to stay. The "place" was a corrugated tin enclosure. Its only opening was a door. In the daytime it was too hot to occupy. At night, Dave and lola made it cool enough for themselves and their two young children by directing the breeze from a fan through wet sacks.

It was about this time, Brubeck recalls, that he told his wife, "I never want to see Paul Desmond again."

The octet was Brubeck's primary passion, but it was doomed by its size and the adventurous character of its music to a life of rehearsals. In an era that loved "OLD BUTTERMILK SKY," "THE ANNIVERSARY SONG," "ZIP-A-DEE-DOO-DAH" and "A, YOU’RE ADORABLE," music informed by the examples of Milhaud and Stravinsky did not get the attention of the masses. Or, if there was a chance that it might have, there was none that it would get past the people who booked clubs and concerts.”

Phil Woods 5tet Feat. Tom Harrell - "Azure"

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Bassist Chuck Israels on alto saxophonist Phil Woods

Quincy Jones had a band that was preparing to tour Europe in the summer of 1959. The band was rehearsing in the mezzanine of the Olympia Theatre and I somehow wrangled an invitation to attend a rehearsal. It was a great hand with some of Quincy's friends from Seattle, like Buddy Catlett and Patti Brown. Les Spann was the guitarist and played some flute solos. Sahib Shihab was in the saxophone section and Joe Harris played drums. I listened to a number of pieces in which there were solos played by various members of the band. It would be unfair to say that those solos were perfunctory, but later, when Phil Woods stood up from the lead alto chair to play his solo feature, the atmosphere changed. Phil played as if there were no tomorrow. The contrast was striking and I have always remembered the impression it left. If you practice rehearsing, then when the lime comes to perform, you are ready to rehearse. Phil practiced performing.

Legendary 1980 Weckl-Gadd-Colaiuta DRUM SHOWDOWN

Larry Bunker's Advice to a Young Drum Student

"Be yourself, keep good time, play musically and don't show off your "chops" [technique]. The only people who can appreciate them are other drummers, and nobody likes them anyway."

JazzProfiles Readers Forum

You have done a great service by reproducing this article. Gene really created a great portrait of Miller, especially with his new (for the time) interviews.

I was a great admirer of Gene's writing, and can say we were friends. If you like, I can send you a link to a memorial article I wrote for Doug Ramsey's blog Rifftides that I wrote after Gene died. He could be quite frustrating at times, but I learned a lot from him, and he definitely helped me to become a better writer.

Hi. I have been visiting his blog for a few months almost daily and I have to thank him for his work, contributing interesting articles about music and Jazz musicians which is helping me discover new things, to value others that I did not appreciate at the time and to recover some that I enjoyed. and I have forgotten. -Greetings and many thanks from Toledo Spain.

Great write up of one helluva release by Bill Lichtenauer of Tantara Productions. Magnificent list, great technology, and fantastic Kenton sounds. Thanks Steve...and thanks, Bill. And the liner notes were done superbly by Michael Sparke of the UK. Tony Agostinelli

Thanks Steven for making this available to a wider readership. This book was like a "bible" to me when I first started collecting aged 16. I still have my original copy ... complete with marginalia as I filled in my collection. I had to wait until I moved to London in 1958 to acquire many of these albums on the British labels like Esquire .... this brings back so many pleasant memories, but it also reminds me that time does proceed, relentlessly.

Garth.

This book was like a "bible" to me when I was a serious collector, aged 16 .... I still have my original copy, in excellent condition after all these years, over three continents complete with marginalia as I built my collection. Bravo to you Steve for making these early observations available for others to read. Raymond Horricks followed this book up with "These Jazzmen Of Our Time" (Gollancz, 1959), which contained some great early portraits by Herman Leonard.

I met him twice. He was playing at a mall with the Westchester jazz band. That was around 97 or so. They were taking a break and I started talking to him. He was super nice. I mention my grandfather was a jazz trumpet player Bunny Berigan. I did not know who Bill was but like the way he played bass that day. I ran across his book on jazz in the white plains library. I was surprise at knowledge and who he played with in jazz. I seen him again at the same place a year later and got to talk to him.Very nice again to me. I asked him about Zoot Sims. And about Benny Goodman which he your with in Russian . My grandfather played with Benny too at one time. Seems they both found him hard to deal with. What a fine man Bill is.

I discovered Oliver Nelson in 1977 and could not believe my ears. At the time it was obviously a vinyl record and belonged to somebody else. However, thanks to the technology of today I can listen to my cd of Blues and the Abstract Truth to my heart's content. You have told me so much more about this wonderful man's unique style. If I want to feel good, I just listen to Stolen Moments. Thank you.

I have been listening to 1 of greatest piece of orchestration of Stan Kenton style music I've ever listened too arranged by a young trumpet player & arranger Bill Mathieu it's Kenton it Mathieu but mostly a great music . the complexed overlays , blending , fitting in soloists at just the right moment , plus the swelling of the whole orchestra to create the Kenton sound without losing his own indemnity is outstanding . Thank Bill Thank you Stan ... Jim Shelton

Peter Haslund has left a new comment on your post "Mark Murphy: 1932-2015, R.I.P.":

Just discovered Mr. Murphy. Gotta say it leaves me speechless that I listened to jazz since the 80s and never once heard his name. All the stuff that sounded so contrived with Sinatra (who obviously knew he was really singing black people's music) is fresh and free with Mark. RIP.

Hi Steven,

I read with interest your recent piece about the Boss Brass. I live in Toronto, and when it comes to the Canadian jazz scene, it's hard to overstate how influential this band was. Besides the quality of McConnell's arrangements, the musicians were all top-name guys in the city (many with vigorous solo careers). What has always floored me about their playing is the tightness and especially intonation in the woodwinds -- the skill of the horn players at playing doubles (flutes and clarinets) is legendary.

I feel fortunate to have been able to hear them live, on a number of occasions. From the stories I've heard, either third-hand or right from former Boss Brass members, Rob was a really hard guy to work with, but certainly pushed his group toward excellence.

I also liked your recent piece on Pat Martino. I'm a big fan of his style. If you haven't read his autobiography, I highly recommend it! His personal story is, of course, fascinating and inspiring.

Speaking of guitarists, someone you may want to profile someday is the Canadian jazz guitarist Ed Bickert. He was the guitarist for the Boss Brass for many decades. He is now quite elderly and no longer playing, but is another of those guys who was phenomenally influential, though I think he largely flew under-the-radar south of the border.

Thanks for putting together such a great site, and best wishes.

Jordan Wosnick

You can share your thoughts, observations and general remarks in the Readers Forum by contacting JazzProfiles via scerra@roadrunner.com

Hi Steve...I'm not a Facebook or Twitter guy so here's hoping this email reaches you...

You indicated that you were not aware of published Mulligan biographies in your recent post on Gerry and I wanted to bring one to your attention that I think you will like:

JERU'S JOURNEY by Sanford Josephson. It was published in 2015 by Hal Leonard Books. It's part of the Hal Leonard Biography Series which also includes bios of Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Mann & Billy Eckstine.

I own the Adderley and Mann bios and also recommend them.

Jeru's Journey is an easy read and covers Mulligan's life from birth to his passing. It is a very good overview and the author--who knew Mulligan and interviewed him before his passing--tells Gerry's story completely including Mulligan's drug addiction, domestic (wives) issues, etc. along with good musical analysis and insights both of the author's and other musicians. In addition to a good discography there are many photographs.

The list price is $19.99. A good buy.

In closing, I would like to tell you how much I have enjoyed your blog over the years. I have recommended it to many musician friends and all have thanked me. Thanks again for helping to keep the jazz alive...

Bruce Armstrong

You can share your thoughts, observations and general remarks in the Readers Forum by contacting JazzProfiles via scerra@roadrunner.com

Les Koenig was clearly a GIANT despite his obvious preference to be low-key, himself. THANK YOU, Steven Cerra!!! The world is a better place because of people like Les! Like Laurie(Pepper) & the list goes on & on forever! Like YOU, Steven! Thanks to ALL who work behind the scenes, on or off-stage, etc. etc. etc... -in support of the featured "Player" & "Sidemen" so that "We the people..." can be out in the audience having the time of our lives enjoying "the show" or "Artistry, Talent, Efforts" and so on! My attitude is one of gratitude!! THIS art form & ALL original American Art forms must be preserved and encouraged to not only survive, but to thrive!!!

Diz

"Jazz is a gift. If you can hear it, you can have it."

Piano Players: Dick Katz on Erroll Garner

“Unique is an inadequate word to describe Erroll Garner. He was a musical phenomenon unlike any other. One of the most appealing performers in Jazz history, he influenced almost every pianist who played in his era, and even beyond. Self-taught, he could not read music, yet he did things that trained pianists could not play or even imagine. Garner was a one-man swing band, and indeed often acknowledged that his main inspiration was the big bands of the thirties – Duke, Basie, Lunceford, et al. He developed a self-sufficient, extremely full style that was characterized by a rock-steady left-hand that also sounded like a strumming rhythm guitar. Juxtaposed against this was a river of chordal or single note ideas, frequently stated in a lagging, behind-the-beat way that generated terrific swing.” [

Paul Desmond

Cannonball Adderley, who was at one point a rival of Paul's in the various polls and whose robust gospel-drenched playing was worlds apart once said: ‘He is a profoundly beautiful player.’ Writer Nat Hentoff said. "He could put you in a trance, catch you in memory and desire, make you forget the garlic and sapphires in the mud."

Drummers Corner: Larry Bunker on Shelly Manne

“In a truly formal sense, Shelly could barely play the drums. If you gave him a pair of sticks and a snare drum and had him play rudi­ments—an open and closed roll, paradiddles, and all that kind of thing—he didn't sound like much. He never had that kind of training and wasn't inter­ested in it. For him it was a matter of playing the drums with the music. He could play more music in four bars than almost anyone else. His drums sounded gorgeous. They recorded sensationally. All you had to hear was three or four bars and you knew it was Shelly Manne. - Larry Bunker, Jazz drummer and premier, studio percussionist

The 1954 Birdland Recordings of Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers

The 1954 Birdland recordings on Blue Note provided the stylistic foundation for the rest of Art Blakey's career. His style had completely crystallized. His pulsation was undeniable, a natural force; the counter-rhythms he brought to the mix made what he played that much more affecting. There was a purity about what he did—and always motion. He was spontaneous, free, creating every minute. That he was in the company of peers, all performing in an admirable manner, had a lot to do with making this "on-the-spot" session such an important musical document. The band never stops burning. The exhilarating Clifford Brown moves undaunted through material, fast, slow, in between, playing fantastic, well-phrased ideas that unfold in an unbroken stream. His technique, almost perfect; his sound, burnished. He's a gift to the senses. Lou Donaldson, an underrated alto player in the Bird tradition, offers much to think about while you're tapping your foot. Horace Silver is crucial to the effect of this music, much of it his own. Certainly the rhythms that inform his piano playing and writing make it all the more soulful. On this and other records he serves as a catalytic agent, provoking swing and engaging intensity. Hard-hitting, unpretentious, communicative, Silver has little use for compositional elements or piano techniques that impede his message. A live-in pulse permeates his music and his playing, strongly affecting the shape, content, and level of excitement of his performances and those of his colleagues. An original and tellingly economic amalgam of Parker, the blues, shuffling dance rhythms, and a taste of the black church for flavor, Silver is quite undeniable. Listen to his delightful "Quicksilver" on A Night at Birdland With the Art Blakey Quintet, Vol. 1 (Blue Note). It capsulizes what he does. On this album, Curly Russell shows once again he can play "up" tempos and interesting changes. He ties in well with Blakey. But Silver and Blakey, in combination, determine the rhythmic disposition of the music. Blakey's natural time and fire raise the heat to an explosive level before the listener realizes how hot the fire has become. Perhaps more than other recordings Blakey has made, the Birdland session documents his great strengths and technical failings. At almost every turn, he shows what an enviably well coordinated, buoyantly confident, rhythmically discerning player he is.

BOP AND DRUMS—A NEW WORLD

From the Introduction to Burt Korall, “Drummin’ Men: The Bebop Years”

“It is difficult for young musicians and jazz devotees to fully comprehend the tumultuous effect that the advent of bop had on drummers. The new music demanded new, relevant, trigger-fast, musical, well-placed reactions from the person behind the drum set—an entirely revamped view of time and rhythm, techniques, and musical attitudes.

How well did drummers deal with bop? The innovators, like Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, opened the path and showed how it was done. Young disciples—if they had talent, sensitivity, and the necessary instincts— caught on and made contributions. Other drummers stylistically modified the way they played, trying to combine the old with the new. This was tricky at best. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it was a matter of apples and oranges. Still others fought change and what it implied.

Not welcomed by many swing drummers and their more traditional predecessors, the new wave was looked upon as the enemy, sources of disruption and unnecessary noise. Those stuck in the past could not accept breaking time, using the drum set as both color resource and time center. The structural and emotional differences essential to bebop, the need for virtuosity, and the ability to think quickly and perform appropriately intimidated them. The demands of the music were strange and often devastating; a feeling of hostility built up in them. The basic reasons were quite clear. The new music could ultimately challenge their earning ability and position in the drum hierarchy."

Gerry Mulligan 1927-1996

“… Gerry Mulligan lived through almost the entire history of jazz. It is against that background that he should be understood.” – Gene Lees

Gunther Schuller on Sonny Rollins

“Rhythmically, Rollins is as imaginative and strong as in his melodic concepts. And why not? The two are really inseparable, or at least should be. In his recordings as well as during several evenings at Birdland recently [Fall/1958] Rollins indicated that he can probably take any rhythmic formation and make it swing. This ability enables him to run the gamut of extremes— from almost a whole chorus of non-syncopated quarter notes (which in other hands might be just naive and square but through Rollins' sense of humor and superb timing are transformed into a swinging line) to asymmetrical groupings of fives and sevens or between the-beat rhythms that defy notation. As for his imagination, it is prodigiously fertile. And indeed I can think of no better and more irrefutable proof of the fact that discipline and thought do not necessarily result in cold or un-swinging music than a typical Rollins performance. No one swings more (hard or gentle) and is more passionate in his musical expression than Sonny Rollins . It ultimately boils down to how much talent an artist has; the greater the demands of his art both emotionally and intellectually the greater the talent necessary.”

Artie Shaw on Louis Armstrong as told to Gene Lees

Artie said, "You are too young to know the impact Louis had in the 1920s," he said. "By the time you were old enough to appreciate Louis, you had been hearing those who derived from him. You cannot imagine how radical he was to all of us. Revolutionary. He defined not only how you play a trumpet solo but how you play a solo on any instrument. Had Louis Armstrong never lived, I suppose there would be a jazz, but it would be very different."

Pops

Bill Crow on Louis Amstrong

Louis Armstrong transformed jazz. He played with a strength and inventiveness that illuminated every jazz musician that heard his music. Louis was able to do things on the trumpet that had previously been considered impossible. His tone and range and phrasing became criteria by which other jazz musicians measured themselves. He established the basic vocabulary of jazz phrases, and his work became the foundation of every jazz musician who followed him.

Bassist Eddie Gomez on Pianist Bill Evans

“Bill's music is profoundly expressive. It is passionate, intellectual, and without pretense. Eleven years with his trio afforded me the opportunity to perform, record, travel, and most importantly learn. My development as an artist is largely due to his encouragement, support, and patience. He instilled confidence in me, while at the same time urging me to search for my own voice and for new ways to make the music vital and creative. And Bill believed that repertoire, both new and old, would organically flourish in repeated live performance. In fact, there were precious few rehearsals, even before recording sessions. … When Bill passed away late in 1980, it was clear that all of us in the jazz world had sustained a huge loss. I was shocked and saddened; in my heart I had always felt that some day there would be a reunion concert. Had I been able to look into a crystal ball and foresee his death, perhaps I might have stayed in the trio for a longer period. I still dream about one more set with Bill. He closes his eyes, turns his head to one side, and every heartfelt note seems etched and bathed in gold. How I miss that sound.”

John Coltrane on Stan Getz

Coltrane himself said of the mellifluous Stan Getz, "Let's face it--we'd all sound like that if we could."

Peter Bernstein on Bobby Hutcherson

I got to play with Bobby Hutcherson at Dizzy's a few years ago, which ended up on a CD [2012's Somewhere In The Night on Kind of Blue Records]. I was four feet away from him, thinking, "How is this man just hitting metal bars with wooden sticks with cotton on the end and making such an expressive statement?" The instrument is just like ... it's him! He's imbuing it with his thoughts and feelings. That's a miraculous thing. The instrument itself disappears when you're talking about a master on that level.

Ralph Bowen

“In a way, the entire act of music is mind put into sound. It has to go through some sort of physical medium in order to be heard. I chose the saxophone, but the whole issue is to have such control over the instrument and over what you hear that the instrument physically doesn't get in the way of visualizing sound. Technique to me means dealing with an instrument in the most efficient manner possible so that it's no more than peripheral to expression."